Tibetan activism

No impact

Tibetan protests seem increasingly ineffective

IN DELHI this week the Indian authorities rolled out the red carpet for leaders of its fellow BRICS, a group of emerging economies that also includes Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa. Security officials were nervous. On March 26th a Tibetan had set himself on fire (see picture) near India's parliament during a protest against Chinese rule in Tibet. The man died two days later. India did not want China's President, Hu Jintao, to be embarrassed by such displays.

The self-immolation in Delhi was not the first act of its kind by a Tibetan outside China. In 1998 another man died after setting himself on fire in Delhi. But an unprecedented recent wave of some 30 self-immolations by Tibetans inside China, many of whom died, has made Chinese officials anxious. In November two other Tibetans suffered relatively minor injuries after setting fire to themselves outside Chinese embassies in Delhi and Kathmandu.

But China does not seem worried that the recent unrest in Tibet might derail its diplomacy. And it has good reason not to be too concerned. Four years ago China came under international pressure when a series of protests and riots swept across the Tibetan plateau. That outbreak coincided with Chinese preparations to stage the Olympic Games in August 2008, a period when international attention was unusually focused on China's human-rights record. The unrest erupted before the global financial crisis made Western leaders more than usually eager to co-operate with China rather than confront it over internal issues such as Tibet.

The West's desire to secure China's help in resolving other global crises has also frustrated Tibetan efforts to push their concerns higher up the diplomatic agenda. Before arriving in Delhi, Mr Hu met Barack Obama, America's president, for 90 minutes on the sidelines of a nuclear-security summit in Seoul. The two leaders discussed North Korea's plans to launch a long-range rocket next month (with a satellite atop it, says the North) as well as the upheaval in Syria.

Accounts of their conversation suggest Mr Hu repeated China's usual expressions of non-committal concern about both problems. Tibet accounts for part of his hesitancy. Under pressure from the West, China abstained on the UN vote authorising a no-fly zone in Libya last year, which ended up going much further (to regime change) than China wanted. Chinese leaders do not want to give a similar green light to Western powers to intervene as they like in Syria. They fear being seen to endorse the West's right to intervene in some way in anti-government protests in China.

Within China itself, the Tibetan self-immolations have caused the government's attitude to harden. Security has increased across the plateau. Foreign journalists are being kept out of most Tibetan areas. Tibetans who set fire to themselves are being branded as “terrorists”. Official media have even revived their efforts to portray the Dalai Lama as a fascist. In a commentary carried in various publications on March 24th, his efforts to find a compromise solution (the so-called “middle way”) that would involve a high degree of autonomy for Tibetans, including control of who can reside within Tibet, was described as “naked ethnic expulsion”. The commentary went on to remark: “How similar this is to Hitler's cleansing of the Jews.”